It's been like that for 45 days at least. The sky turns from the color of the far side of the ocean to the color of the shallow parts of Ocean Beach, and her face is pressing against my side and she's moving her body in a dream about dancing, and I'm already awake, and when she finally comes to and opens her eyes, she's crumbling. That's what skeletons do, and my bed is full of dust. Please forgive me if this is too emo, please forgive me if this is too much like something out of something that I might write.
I would like nothing better than to take the dust and place it in a glass of water and honey, and wait for the five days it would take to turn it back to bundles of hair. I think I should be more unsettled by the idea that this is what I would like the most. I also think that after three years of poring over the impossible inscriptions on skin, that doing the work of magic is the only right thing to do as these perpetual motion machines are all coming to a stop at the same time.
It might seem lonelier than it actually feels, populated as it is with the hundred impossible ghosts who could never write enough on my skin, which is becoming more elastic with each passing moon. I keep myself taut, because I am apparently unteachable, so the only chance for learning will come through skin and not through any higher mental functions. Or rather, it is enacted through the tongue, and not the thing that tells the tongue what to say. I don't know when these things separated, the "I am therefore I am" that got tangled up with undecided impulses, and on most days I am not very grateful for the things that broke me, but I am grateful that I am broken.
I know it lived somewhere in the margins of a book by Zoe Valdes before it got born in me, written on my skin in longing, then in metaphor, then in that peculiar lover's dew that haunts us all when we're stuck between cars, parked by the ocean, and hoping that it's not the police behind us because our skin is not the kind of dry that they like to see by the sea. I made a list of the things I would lose in this life when my daughter was born, because I wanted to understand that it takes more than food and time to make flesh solid, and love is loss as much as anything. We don't know where the parts of us go when they do go, poured over skin or kept in pockets or taken in the middle of the night when we're sleeping. We don't know what happens to the gifts that we give, thinking they are unconditional and pure, but are covered with thorns intended to keep the other pricked and remembering our names, in case they might whisper them accidentally when the next lover comes around.
The next lover always does come around, and the next lover always writes over what we did, and at times it is very much like we are as base and as complex as wolves, and entirely territorial. It's written in patterns of jealous blood even when the discourse might speak of unconditional surrender and attachment without strings. And it's writing on me very hard, these days before I get rewritten into a year marked by double Iroso, that there are certain ethnic distinctions among the animals that we are becoming, that make me believe that I'm not at all color blind, so if I say that I do find the Mexican wolf so much sexier than the Canadian wolf, it's because I am entirely racist when it comes to my animal nature, and I know what I like.
What makes me more sad, however, than finding my own boundaries are more present than I'd suspected, is that the next lover might not write as much as me, or as well, but when it's written, my memory stands a good chance of being erased entirely. That is to say, it may live somewhere in thought, but not in the skin, and the tongue sometimes speaks of longing because it is trying to capture what is no longer there. That is to say, I didn't know I was writing on her, but now that I see it, I have become very attached to the writing, just in time to watch it disappear. On the mornings when I am waking up with skeletons, I hope that the disappearing ink is the kind that might light up with enough light, the kind that a full moon can bring, but I can't trust in anything, at least not this week.
And just for today, I won't drink, and I won't trust humans who never walk in animal skin, and if I had any control over my nostalgic tongue, I would promise not to miss her, but I have no control over that.
I would like nothing better than to take the dust and place it in a glass of water and honey, and wait for the five days it would take to turn it back to bundles of hair. I think I should be more unsettled by the idea that this is what I would like the most. I also think that after three years of poring over the impossible inscriptions on skin, that doing the work of magic is the only right thing to do as these perpetual motion machines are all coming to a stop at the same time.
It might seem lonelier than it actually feels, populated as it is with the hundred impossible ghosts who could never write enough on my skin, which is becoming more elastic with each passing moon. I keep myself taut, because I am apparently unteachable, so the only chance for learning will come through skin and not through any higher mental functions. Or rather, it is enacted through the tongue, and not the thing that tells the tongue what to say. I don't know when these things separated, the "I am therefore I am" that got tangled up with undecided impulses, and on most days I am not very grateful for the things that broke me, but I am grateful that I am broken.
I know it lived somewhere in the margins of a book by Zoe Valdes before it got born in me, written on my skin in longing, then in metaphor, then in that peculiar lover's dew that haunts us all when we're stuck between cars, parked by the ocean, and hoping that it's not the police behind us because our skin is not the kind of dry that they like to see by the sea. I made a list of the things I would lose in this life when my daughter was born, because I wanted to understand that it takes more than food and time to make flesh solid, and love is loss as much as anything. We don't know where the parts of us go when they do go, poured over skin or kept in pockets or taken in the middle of the night when we're sleeping. We don't know what happens to the gifts that we give, thinking they are unconditional and pure, but are covered with thorns intended to keep the other pricked and remembering our names, in case they might whisper them accidentally when the next lover comes around.
The next lover always does come around, and the next lover always writes over what we did, and at times it is very much like we are as base and as complex as wolves, and entirely territorial. It's written in patterns of jealous blood even when the discourse might speak of unconditional surrender and attachment without strings. And it's writing on me very hard, these days before I get rewritten into a year marked by double Iroso, that there are certain ethnic distinctions among the animals that we are becoming, that make me believe that I'm not at all color blind, so if I say that I do find the Mexican wolf so much sexier than the Canadian wolf, it's because I am entirely racist when it comes to my animal nature, and I know what I like.
What makes me more sad, however, than finding my own boundaries are more present than I'd suspected, is that the next lover might not write as much as me, or as well, but when it's written, my memory stands a good chance of being erased entirely. That is to say, it may live somewhere in thought, but not in the skin, and the tongue sometimes speaks of longing because it is trying to capture what is no longer there. That is to say, I didn't know I was writing on her, but now that I see it, I have become very attached to the writing, just in time to watch it disappear. On the mornings when I am waking up with skeletons, I hope that the disappearing ink is the kind that might light up with enough light, the kind that a full moon can bring, but I can't trust in anything, at least not this week.
And just for today, I won't drink, and I won't trust humans who never walk in animal skin, and if I had any control over my nostalgic tongue, I would promise not to miss her, but I have no control over that.
No comments:
Post a Comment